When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes--Desiderius Erasmus...
A room without books is like a body without a soul--Cicero...
You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend--Paul Sweeney...

Wednesday, October 7

The evolution of a romance reader

Wendy has a great post up on Romancing the Blog today about romance genre ground breakers. Definitely worth a read and a thought today.

This got me thinking about my ground zero of romance. Where did my addiction to romance start and how did it evolve?

Westerns--real westerns, without love interest westerns, Zane Grey type of westerns. I was horse crazy as a kid. What is the backbone of westerns? To an 11 or 12 year old kid it was the horse--yes, I said the horse. But, even then I thought something was missing. I also read other things like The Little House Books and Anne of Green Gables please note these books also had horses and ponies :)

Harlequin Presents--HPs came next. Harlequin Presents with horses that is--LOL. I inhaled anything written by Janet Dailey (which I hate to admit since her plagiarism scandal). That is anything written by Janet Dailey with horses.

In the 8th grade I read Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman--this was my epiphany. It was a true love story. The school librarian gave me the book at the end of the school year because I'd taken it out over and over again. It's probably in box packed away in my attic.

Then I started reading anything with a romantic theme. Anything published by Harlequin (the Silhouette lines hadn't started yet).

The discovery of Kathleen Woodiwiss (borrowed from an aunt) was mind-blowing. History, romance, adventure--OMG, she had it all, and they were epic--more than 150 or 180 pages. At this point I was reading other genres equally. Stephen King was getting popular and I read Carrie and The Shining, and other adult books, some books a young teenager should never have read.

Up until the mid 80's I was simply looking for romance books. Then I really started to discover "authors" other than Kathleen Woodiwiss, Barbara Cartland (even then Cartland readers didn't admit to being Cartland readers, my Regency romance passion started with Cartland and Georgette Heyer) and Janet Dailey (though at this point I'd outgrown Janet Dailey--I was amazed by her Calder series when it was new). The discovery of other authors sent me into autobuy mode... Linda Howard, Nora Roberts, Catherine Coulter, Judith McNaught, Jude Devereaux, Sandra Brown, Julie Garwood, Jill Barnett, Lavryle Spencer... I can remember the day I discoverd Lavyrle Spencer. I'd stopped in a local drug store for something else, stopped at the book display and found Seperate Beds, the main characters were my age--it was amazing.

I'm still hooked, much to the dismay of my husband--books overrun our house, if there is a flat surface, there's probably a romance novel sitting on it, actually more than one :)

Rosie, I pulled this from the publisher's weekly review on Amazon for the sequel...

Apparently some sequels take longer to appear than others: more than 50 years after the publication of the popular Mrs. Mike, which told of Mary O'Fallon's journey from Boston to Alberta and her marriage to RCMP Sgt. Mike Flanagan, the story continues during WWII with one of Mary's adopted children, Kathy Forquet. Mike has been dead for six years and Kathy, whose background is Cree, decides to learn more about the heritage of her late mother, Oh-Be-Joyful.

The bolded part made me sad. But I will look for it. From what I can see it's only available used at Amazon, so I'll try to see if my library can get it.